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Open-Source R500 Driver Released

Phoronix News: Open-Source R500 Driver Released

The very first (and very rudimentary) open-source Xorg driver for the ATI Radeon X1000 "R500" series has been released! However, before downloading it, this driver only contains code to initialize and set video modes on the Radeon X1300 to X1600 graphics cards. RandR 1.2 support for the R500 driver is being worked on and may surface shortly. Their current road-map is for getting the Radeon X1600 to X1900 series initialize using this driver, add the RandR 1...

You have to add your card's PCI ID to the driver to get it working. I managed.

Yay!

I first tried to get it working at my monitor's widescreen resolution; it didn't work, but man it was funky. Then I looked at the code to see if I could extend it to set the resolution to 1280x800, but it's all magic numbers to me. Note that they've called some of the registers "mystery". Ah, the pain of reverse engineering.

I think the 2D may be slower than VESA, but I love it because it's free. What's interesting is it's GPLed (version 2 only): it can only be good that ATI can't come and add their code to fglrx. Man, that'd be cheeky.